1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to elastic cloud applications.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Consider, for example, a scenario where an application hosted on a cloud (on one or more virtual machines) has a security component for user authentication and identity management. If the workload for the application increases because the application is elastic, a non-security component of the application may be allocated more capacity so the application can process more incoming requests. However, when the capacity for the security component is not increased in a proportionate manner this may cause a bottleneck. For example, user authentication requests may not be timely processed thereby affecting response time, service latency and throughput. Similar bottlenecks may also occur in other components such as those associated with monitoring, provenance data collection, etc.
The cloud, or more particularly, cloud computing may refer to the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a metered service over a network (typically the internet).